Leaving Loneliness Behind: 5 Keys to Experiencing God's Love and Building Healthy Connections with Others

By Regina Boyd

Our connections with God and others are fundamental to who we are as people. The reality is that often these relationships—especially with our family, friends, and others around us—are less than ideal, and we end up feeling lonely. That loneliness makes us doubt God’s promises, our friends and family, and even the idea that we are worthy of love at all.

In Leaving Loneliness Behind, licensed Catholic therapist Regina Boyd helps you build the skills you need to have meaningful, rich, and rewarding relationships with God and those around you.

Emotional intimacy is the antidote to loneliness, Boyd says. It’s about sharing yourself and your feelings more deeply with another person—being vulnerable and trusting through what you say and how you act.

So how do we reach emotional intimacy? Boyd identifies five keys:

1. Recognize the potential depths in your existing relationships.
2. Allow yourself to be vulnerable so that true intimacy is possible.
3. Communicate through conflicts in a way that encourages affection, trust, and openness.
4. Acknowledge the past and move toward emotional wholeness.
5. Give of yourself for the sake of the relationship.

 

Each chapter includes a real-life story that illustrates how applying the principles of emotional intimacy can transform marriages, friendships, families, and workplaces. Catholic thought, stories from scripture, and teachings from the Church highlight how our faith connects to our daily actions and exchanges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ave Maria Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781646802050

Regina Boyd

Regina Boyd is a licensed mental health counselor and marriage and family therapist. She is the founder of Boyd Counseling Services and a contributor to the Hallow app. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Central Florida and a master’s degree in mental health counseling from Rollins College. Boyd has presented extensively on the intersection of mental health and Catholicism for national organizations including the Catholic Campus Ministry Association, Given Institute, FemCatholic, and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Her work has been featured by Catholic Women in Business and FemCatholic, and on SiriusXM’s The Catholic Channel. Boyd lives with her family in Orlando, Florida, where she assists with parish and diocesan marriage formation.

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"Leaving Loneliness Behind is the book you’ve been looking for. Regina Boyd does an incredible job of taking abstract ideas and turning them into something you can touch, something you can do, and something you can then share with the world. Her use of the emotional roadmap is so insightful, really leading the reader to the ultimate destination: healing and wholeness. I challenge every reader to turn these pages with an open heart. This book is going to change your life."

Rachel Bulman

Contributor to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries

With honesty and insight, this introduction into the loneliness in every human heart and our desire for connection validates daily experiences and sheds light on pathways forward. Addressing trust and betrayal, relationships and communication, healing and growth—all through the lens of our Catholic faith—Boyd’s conversational style and experience will make you feel accompanied.

Sr. Bethany Madonna, SV

Vocations director for the Sisters of Life

We all yearn for deeper connection and intimacy. Yet our wounds and self-centeredness often become barriers, keeping us isolated. This book (and workbook) based on Regina Boyd’s experience as a Catholic therapist is filled with practical wisdom. I highly recommend it. Put her words into practice and your relationships will flourish.

Bob Schuchts

Author of Be Healed

"In Leaving Loneliness Behind, Boyd offers a sincere path toward connection and communion that does not shy away from difficult realities. She draws not only from her clinical expertise but also is generous in offering the fruit of her own journey and prayer to bring together this work, which is a gift to the Church, especially in our time."

Sr. Josephine Garrett, CSFN

Licensed counselor

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© 2023 by Regina Boyd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Ave Maria Press, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556, 1-800-282-1865.

Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.

www.avemariapress.com

Paperback: ISBN-13 978-1-64680-204-3

E-book: ISBN-13 978-1-64680-205-0

Cover image © GettyImages.com.

Cover and text design by Christopher D. Tobin.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Introduction

1. The Antidote to Loneliness: Authentic Connection

2. The Beginning: Trust and Vulnerability

3. The Tools: Communicating during Conflict

4. The Layers: Our Past Wounds and Seeking Healing

5. The Gift: Self-Donation

Appendix: Questions to Add Detail to Your Relationship Road Map

Author Biography

During my years caring for patients, the most common condition I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.

—Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General of the United States

Natalie is a woman in her early thirties who came to me for counseling. Prior to meeting me, Natalie appeared to have it all together. She had a large social circle, and she was moving fast toward becoming a tenured professor. She was very close with her sister, whom she considered her best friend, and her sister’s children. She was the coolest aunt on the block. She lived the ideal young adult life: traveling, socializing, vibrant faith life, dating, and increased responsibilities at work.

But Natalie didn’t come to see me to tell me how perfect her life was. Something had been bothering her, but it was difficult for Natalie to put a finger on it. Then, shortly before she came to see me, Natalie’s boyfriend of three years ended their relationship. Suddenly single, she realized she was lonely. But the loneliness was not due to the breakup. Natalie realized that she had been feeling lonely for several years. She had felt lonely for so long that it was difficult to recall when she hadn’t felt lonely.

As she shared more with me, she admitted that she had used the external factors in life—friendships, dating, and work—to distract her from the nagging loneliness. The end of her long-term relationship had just made things bad enough for her to pay attention. She realized she was a worried, anxious, and insecure person. She worried about people judging her for not being married at this point in her life and that others would assume something was wrong with her. She felt like an imposter at work and was afraid that her colleagues recognized her as a fraud when she was promoted. Though she was surrounded by so many people who cared about her and she appeared to have a fulfilling life, she felt detached, misunderstood by others, and alone. I don’t get it, Natalie expressed during our first session. People have it so much worse than I do. I feel so silly complaining about this. Something just doesn’t feel right. I just feel off . . . and really lonely.

What Natalie didn’t realize was that she wanted more out of all her relationships, she just didn’t know what. Natalie knew how to make friends, how to be social, and how to find a boyfriend, but she didn’t know how rich, deep, meaningful, and interpersonal those relationships could be. Friendship and dating had simply never been that way for her. My job was to help her see what she was missing.

Made for Relationships

You were made to taste and see the best of everything God has to offer. One of the remarkable things about God’s goodness is that it is experienced primarily in relationships. If you think about the most powerfully positive emotional experiences of your life, how many of them have occurred in the presence of other people? How many with those you love and call friends? There’s a good chance that nearly all of them were so. This should come as no surprise to us because relationships are fundamental to human existence. From the moment we are born, we need relationships. Children who grow up surrounded by love thrive in a variety of ways, while children who experience a severe lack of love languish; some even die if the neglect is severe enough. From the moment we are conceived, we are made for relationships and nearly every facet of our lives confirms this reality.

God made us for relationships because he made us like himself. Our God is trinitarian and exists eternally in relationship. We, uniquely in all of creation, reflect this reality in our being. Our whole self—our physicality and our emotional interior life—confirm this. Our experiences of love, intimacy, and longing for closeness confirm this. We are made to love and to be loved. The greatest commandment confirms this. When Jesus was asked by a student of the law to condense the moral life into one commandment, Jesus told us to love God above all things and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mt 22:36–40). You were made to experience the best of everything God has to offer and you will do this primarily in and through relationships.

Gaudium et Spes highlights the type of relationships we are made for: This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself (sec. 24). This points us back to the words of Jesus in Luke 17:33: Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will save it. The mystery and paradox of our faith is that relationships allow us to experience the fullness of life and self-sacrificing love for the other. Part of the reason Natalie was unsatisfied with her relationships is that those relationships rarely required her to be self-sacrificial. Because she never risked much, she never gained much.

Pope St. John Paul II in his theology of the body refers to this mystery of human love as the spousal meaning of the body. Now, don’t worry too much about the term spousal here, as Pope St. John Paul II isn’t saying that only married couples can love this way. He explains that in marriage, spouses make the mystery of God’s love visible in their complete gift of self to each other, in not only the unitive sexual act but also every sincere act of love they make for each other. In other words, the human body reveals the reality that we are made for intimate, self-sacrificial relationships.

This reality follows the pattern of love set out for us by Jesus, who as our bridegroom makes a perfect and perpetual gift of himself on the Cross and in the Eucharist. When we reciprocate that gift, we experience the greatest mystery of all in the love of the Trinity. Just as the heights of human experience occur in relationships, so too does our experience of the divine exist only in a deeply intimate relationship. Relationships with God and neighbor are the key to understanding, experiencing, and participating in the greatest goods possible.

But our lived reality is far from this idyllic vision of perfect relationships with our family, friends, and neighbors. Loneliness has been the sole companion for all of us at some point, and for many of us all the time. Loneliness makes us doubt God’s promise, doubt our friends and family, and doubt that we are worthy of being loved at all. It tells us that no one understands us or cares about us. It lies to us and tells us that the people we love would rather not be around us and that